The Design of TicTic

Hi! Creating TicTic was a truly wonderful experience and I'd love to share with you a few insights from the making of the game. It's a variation on Tic-Tac-Toe in which you play on two tiles at once. I made it in 48 hours for the GMTK game jam. If you haven't tried it yet, make sure to give it a go here :)! Let's start with the balancing…

Balancing the players

In many games, the first player to move has a slight tactical advantage. In TicTic, I found this problem even more apparent: without any modifications, the first player can often straight up force wins in just a couple moves!

I had to try a few different approaches – limiting the starting move to just one tile (not two) seemed like a natural solution. There is only one key tile that has no pair: the center of the board. Having the first move always be in the center still proved to be overpowered though.

The solution I went with was to only allow the first move to be on the perimeter.

This makes it so that the first player can't immediately take control of the precious 3x3 centre. Instead, the second player can! And the first has more crosses on the board throughout the game. It roughly balances out. I have some (imperfect) data from the online multiplayer: 66 % of the time the game results in a win for the cross or a tie. Looks pretty even!

There are a few "side effects" of this solution worth mentioning. I think the best plus is how it helps jump right into the game: there are limited options for the first move, so it's easier to choose. The second player has way more freedom, but the two crosses on the board help to get a general idea of a good move. Then there are a few other effects: it gives the game a bit of imperfect information, output randomness and makes it a little asymmetric. I think it mostly makes the gameplay more exciting, though it has some negatives too (like being less competitive).

Board generation

It's important to establish what makes a good board. When I was prototyping on paper, I had it all in my control: I spread out the numbers evenly across the board, avoiding patterns and same-numbered tiles next to each other. But making everything by hand is super time consuming – and the boards would still be very repetitive!

There are so many ways to generate the pairs. We want it to be random, but simply shuffling 25 numbers won't yield anything fun! Here is the solution I came up with: the board is split into four sections of six (excluding the 0) and every two sections share two pairs.

What the numbers are and their location in each section are random.

This approach makes it so that the two numbers in a pair are generally quite far from each other – but they can also sometimes touch, spicing it up.

Online multiplayer

It was on my bucket list for a long time. And TicTic was the perfect opportunity!
Some technical details: The online multiplayer works through basic HTTP requests: I wrote the backend in PHP with MySQL and it now sits on my website. It was all surprisingly easy to implement! The biggest problem was probably with the player able to Alt+F4 / lose connection literally anytime. So I save the times and delete matches on timeout.

Having online multiplayer really made the game stand out in the jam. I played a lot with my friends and also random strangers. The matchmaking was quite alive! In just two weeks, there were about 350 games played online.

It is definitely not for everyone (as you need a server) and it doesn't fit every game. But I wish there were more jam games with an online element, it's always so exciting to compare your scores on a leaderboard or to otherwise connect with other people!

Final words

There you have it, a rundown of the most important aspects of TicTic. The game ended up in the top 2.5 % in the Fun category, which I'm super grateful for :). Huge thanks for reading through! If you have any feedback on the devlog, please let me know in the comments or on Discord (tonylium).
Hope to see you in the jam next year!